HOUSTON -- The New Orleans Saints are paying half the $600,000 salary of traded quarterback Archie Manning as he plays for the Houston Oilers this year, next year and in 1984, an Oilers official says.
Terms of the unusual agreement reached Friday stipulate the Oilers are to pay all of Manning's relatively large, cash salary in the final season of his five-year contract, 1985.
Manning is one of the highest paid National Football League players, and his contract is unusual in that his salary is paid in the season played. In contrast, the Oilers' Earl Campbell is to receive half of his reported $500,000 salary in future years.
A Saints spokesman Saturday declined to discuss the unusual pay arrangement, which casts a different light on the deal that sent 11-year-pro Manning, 33, to the Oilers for All-Pro offensive tackle Leon Gray, 30.
Oilers General Manager Ladd Herzeg said the pay arrangement was the key to the deal.
'We wouldn't have made the trade otherwise,' said Herzeg, a hardliner when it comes to maintaining an equitable Oilers players' salary structure. Herzeg also refuses all requests to renegotiate players' contracts.
'It would have been hard to justify to the other members of this football team paying $600,000 in cash to our No. 2 quarterback,' he said.
Manning practiced Saturday and was to be in uniform Sunday as the Oilers hosted the Seattle Seahawks.
Even at the $300,000 cash salary level, Manning will be paid more this season than any other Oiler.
Saints Coach Bum Phillips first proposed the trade Monday and the Oilers were interested because Gray, who had played for $135,000 last season, refused to report this year unless he was paid more than twice that in cash in 1982.
The Oilers at one time offered Gray $150,000 in cash and $100,000 in deferred money. By paying Manning $300,000 this year, the Oilers will pay him twice what they had offered contract holdout Gray in up-front money.
Gray apparently got a better deal from the Saints than the Oilers offered.
Herzeg had refused to change the offers that were on the table to Gray July 15, the day the collective bargaining agreement with the National Football League Players' Association expired.
Herzeg had refused to change the offer after July 15, but Gray - the Oilers' NFLPA representative -- demanded to negotiate a better deal, over NFLPA Executive Director Ed Garvey's objections, a source said.
